Regenerative farmer Rick Clark discusses best practices & the future of agriculture with John Kempf

I am very, very honored. As you can see, Rick and I are sitting together in my home, and it is quite an honor to have Rick come here and visit in person. I'm really looking forward to not just having this conversation, but we're going to have an awesome evening together. And morning. Tomorrow morning, Rick is staying here for the night. I enjoy these types of conversations. It's important for all of us to have community and to have great relationships and have peers in this space that can support us and can encourage us and can give us a kick in the butt when we need it. And that's what you came for, right?

Sure. I'll be the heavy muscle guy.

Yeah. So we're just going to have a fun conversation, talking a little bit about Rick's operation, following up on the podcast interview we had a couple of weeks ago, and talk about whatever it is that we want to talk about. And what we need you for in this conversation is to challenge us and to inspire us. So we're going to be having a conversation about Rick's no till cover cropping and some of the challenges that he's working on. But we have here in front of us, we also have a phone that has all the questions coming through. So you can type any questions into the Q and A box. And I invite you to ask the challenging questions. Not of me. You can ask me questions anytime, but direct them to Rick and we're going to have fun.

That's going to be a blast. I'm honored to be here, John. Thank you. Thanks for having me for a second time. I want this to be fun, casual, easy, and very informative to the audience. So let's see what we can do.

It's not even possible for you and I to have a conversation without it being informative.

That's right. Yeah, that's right.

At least to someone.

Yeah, yeah. Someone is going to think it's informative somewhere.

Yeah.

But, you know, I'd like to start out by talking about community first. You already mentioned that community is very important because we can't do this by ourselves, and we need to surround ourselves with good people. You're only as good as the people that you surround yourself with. It's that simple. And that community can be worldwide. I mean, it can be someone on the other side of the planet. It could be someone in Ohio. It just doesn't matter where that community comes from. But I firmly believe that this regenerative or this regenerative style of farming, this movement, whatever you want to call this, is being led by the farmer. And I think this is very important. It's very important that the farmer is in control here and that the end user, the consumer, is demanding this. And now it's time for that retailer to start building that model that fits both things that are happening here.

You know, there is this in the financial development world, personal development world, there's this saying that your personal income is the average of your five closest friends. And I think there's probably the same could be said of our farming practices, that our farming practices and where we are in life is a reflection of the people we surround ourselves with. That's.

I never thought about like that, but you're exactly right. Yeah. I mean, it's so hard, John, to stay. Stay the path sometimes because there's so much outside noise that's negative or against what you're trying to do.

And.

But it's imperative that we stay the course because what we're trying to do is way beyond building soul health, it's building community, it's building human health, and it's saving this planet from destructing itself. So all of these things are important.

You know, when there's been some interesting research asking the question about how do people change their minds and how do people begin adopting a different approach or different technologies? And the number one way that is like seven times more effective than the next second best is learning from their peers. And so I think this means I get two things from this. One is it means we need to surround ourselves with the peers that we want to learn from. And two, for those of us who are passionate about regenerative agriculture, it means we also need to communicate to our peers and to be those leaders, all of us need to be a leader in that space.

That's right. I've taken the word failure out of my vocabulary. It's too negative of a word. Outcomes I did not expect or what I would rather use. And then how are we going to not let those happen again? How are we learning from those? But that also goes a little further. It's so important to have that. That that surrounding group around you is with you and in support of you. If you have negative. I've always said if you have negative, people around, you get different people because negativity drags everybody down.

You know, it's really interesting how our perceptions around what we call failure change between people we expect to be growing and people who we assume to be done growing. And this is, at a societal level, what would happen if we were to reflect on our children who are learning to walk or learning to ride a bike, and we were to call their accidents a failure, but we don't. We recognize that they're learning a new skill, and we encourage them, we support them. But then somewhere around the transition to adulthood, we assume that people should have fully perfected all these things, and now things become failures with negative connotations instead of supporting and encouraging people.

That's right.

Interesting social shift.

It's very interesting. Very dangerous.

Yeah.

Because it can set that trap for outcomes we didn't expect.

Yeah. And.

And that's not good. So, you know, everyone that's involved in our operation, I don't call them employees. I call them team members. They're part of the team. We ask for their input all the time. How, you know, hey, you might not like the way Rick's doing something. Let me hear. I'm always open for suggestions.

Yeah, let's.

Let's figure out how to make this better for everybody. And I've got great people. Oh, my gosh. I'm probably the most blessed person in the world. I've had such great ancestors before me that saw the values of purchasing land and the ownership of land and building infrastructure. And I'm blessed with the people I'm surrounded with, and I'm blessed with the people that I get to know every day now. There's always somebody new calling, reaching out with an email. Hey, I'm doing the similar things you are. How can we make this better? I get to meet you. I finally met you. We've crossed. You know, we've had near misses several times for the last three or four years, but finally we meet in person, and this is going to be a great relationship.

I really think that I can compete with you for the top spot in having the best team, because the team at AEA is pretty extraordinary.

It's important. It's important. Yeah.

So before we started, before we turned the cameras on, we were having a bit of a conversation about not just the importance of having a community, but the health of our communities and our own personal health. And I spoke at a panel, a keynote panel at Acres USA last week. And one of the pieces that came out of that conversation was the care that we have for ourselves and how we reflect that in the community at large. I came to an interesting realization sometime in the last year that most of us don't appreciate the golden rule for what it actually is. We all know the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. But if I were. If I. And I did this exercise I went out and asked a bunch of people, what does the Golden Rule mean? Don't quote it to me. Don't tell me what the quote is, but tell me what does it mean? And I got the same answer dozens of times. The Golden Rule means that you don't do things to other people that you don't want them to do to you. Except that's not what it says. That second interpretation of not doing things to other people, that is two things. One is it's completely passive. You can be in a room, isolated from society and obey that version of the Golden Rule. And secondly, it's also negative. Don't do things to other people. But the actual Golden Rule is positive. Do things to other people that you want them to do to you. That is active. And it's positive rather than passive and negative. And what I came to, and the reason I'm bringing this up, is as we go down this pathway of learning about soil health and ecosystem health and learning about our personal health, we start learning about the challenges represented by household chemicals and agricultural chemicals. If we want to make changes in our own internal life and have those potential negatives influence us less, how good of a job are we doing in sharing that message with other people? That's an expression of the Golden Rule. Are we communicating those challenges to other people? Are we being leaders in that space the way that we should be?

I'm trying to do that. I am trying to. I have now. I mean, I have gone through some health, some health issues myself, John. I want to. I want to talk a little bit about that. You don't realize how important your health is till you don't have it. Yeah, okay, so I am a hypocrite, folks. I was the biggest hypocrite there ever was toward my own health of my body. I was focusing everything on the health of the soil. How do we get livestock across the farm? How can we get the infrastructure built? How do we get the diversity that we need to have? How do we get crop rotations in place? How does all this fall into place? And while this is all going on, my health is going down the drain. I have eaten and drank my way into becoming a diabetic. And I am now a. What's. What's it called? I just forgot this.

Pre diabetic, types of diabetics. Type 2.

Type 2. I'm a type 2 diabetic. And because of that, it was all, all done because of the, the amount of the kinds of foods that I was eating and the drinks that I Was drinking high sugar, high carbs, very low exercise. Now, the good news is I've been on a strict diet of reduced carbohydrates and reduced sugar. And the important thing here, John, that I want to mention, is it's about balance. It's about being in balance. And that is where my diet is. It is now balanced between the proteins, the fats, the starches, the carbs and the sugars. And as a result of that and some exercise, I am now no longer on insulin and I'm not on any medications whatsoever. So all of this is being accomplished with just the mere fact of changing my diet and trying to get headed toward more balance, which is exactly what I'm trying to do. Within the soil microbial biome, we are trying to get balance. I think it is so important. When I sit and look at nutrition, I look at it in two ways. I look at nutrient density. I look at it as we have 30% less nutrient density in our food than we have 25 years ago. That is insane. How can that be? We are supposed to be one of the strongest, best thriving countries in the world, and we have that kind of an issue going on. To me, that points to the health of the soil. Our soils are absolutely wore out and they are now fixated and have to be constantly being in the environment of synthetic fertilizers and synthetic chemistry to even have a hope of raising a crop.

I used to make the comment that balance is the only thing that is impossible to overdo. Anything else can be overdone. When you describe it being a hypocrite, that's perhaps a little bit strong language. Yet I think it's true that for many of us in the soil health movement, it's worth asking the question. We profess these values for soil health and optimizing plant health, but do we actually live it?

Mm. I was not, but I am now. Now, let me go on and talk about the second part of what I look at human health. The first part is nutrient density. So let me. Let's stay there just for a moment. You know, there's always this question, how are we going to feed all these people by. By 2050 or whatever that number is? Well, how about we start with increasing the nutrient density so the amount of food that we are able to give to those. Those folks are at least at a higher level of nutrition. We can start there. And then once that just feeds on itself, so then once you start to get that body more healthy, then they start to blossom and flourish and they can open their mind up and think about how to take care of things in their own back backyard.

One of the consultants that really inspired me, starting out down this pathway 15 years ago, one of the things that really caught my attention was a presentation where the comment was made that in order for us to get the same attrition that our grandparents got from eating an apple today, we need to eat three apples. And that's just. And then we look at the public health landscape and we see right now, in the last 10 years, in 2010, 10% of all of the youth under the age of 18 in the United States had some type of autoimmune challenge. By 2020, it was 18%. So it jumped from 10% to 18%.

Almost double.

Yeah. It's one out of five of young people under the age of 18 that have an autoimmune disease. And this is something that I think you and I are on the same page on it. This is at least partially an agricultural problem.

We cannot have human health until we have soil health. It's that simple. Now, the second way I look at human health is this. This really hit me about six or eight weeks ago. I don't know what I was doing, but it just came at me and hit me. I am the first generation to be exposed to chemicals my whole life. Okay, now just hang on. Yes, my father had chemicals when he farmed, but he did not have the use of those chemicals till he was in his late 40s, early 50s. I've been out helping dad since I was 14 years old. I've been around these chemicals my whole life. No more. We have taken every synthetic input away from this farm. It's gone. No more chemistry. No more synthetic fertilizers. I am not going to expose my children to it and I'm not going to expose my grandchildren to it.

So I have a question for you. What soaps and cleaners do you use in your house?

We try to use clean cleaners and soaps that are as natural and as organic as we possibly can. We're trying to eliminate as much like the aluminums and I can't think of everything right at the moment, John, but we are trying to. When we go to town and it's hard to shop this way. When you want to shop and eat healthy, that's hard. That should be easy. It's very easy to. It's just like the chemistry easy button. Just run to the fast food store and get something to eat. Well, that is absolutely the worst food we can be consuming. High process, very low Nutrient dense foods.

My wife is a natural health practitioner and so I get to hear many of the stories of people with really challenging conditions. And you know, it's interesting how many we talk about the environmental toxins and the lack of nutrition in our food supply. But a significant contributing factor is household chemicals, cleaners and stuff that we use are way, way more tox than should ever be considered acceptable or permissible. And yet they're used in the mainstream. Right.

So, but I think this all is this underlying tone of being a regenerative farmer. That's what this means. It means, you know, massive reduction, if not elimination. So it may sound a little strange to our viewers here today or why we're talking about this, but this, this has that. This is part of the fabric, part of the foundation of being a regenerative farmer.

It's interesting for us at advancing eco agriculture. I want to work with people who care about the things that we care about, who share our values of eating healthy and nutrition dense food and taking care of ourselves. And we work with lots of farmers across the Midwest. And it's difficult for us to eat well when we're traveling across the Midwest. It's called a good food desert for a reason. And this is farming country. If there is any place where we should be able to get really healthy, nutritious food, it should be here, but we can't. It's very difficult. Whether it's at restaurants or supermarkets or whatever, it's difficult to find good food across much of the Midwest. And that's the direct antithesis of what should be the case.

Right, yeah, totally agree.

So I want to bring this back full circle. How have things evolved with your diabetes?

We, it's, it's, it's excellent. I mean, the first thing I did when I got sick was, was went to see an endocrinologist. Okay, that's, that's obvious. They drew blood. They did all, you know, hey, you know, if you. She was very open minded. She said, if you follow my instructions. I think based on what she got from my interview, she can accomplish this in 30 days. She did the second thing after I left the endocrinologist office. Excuse me, I went and hire a nutritionist just like I would hire you to come and look at the farm and fix what's wrong with the soil. Same thing. So again, I'm in the office of the nutritionist and, and she, she hears about everything that, that I've gone through in the last four days and she figures that I weigh 400 pounds and that I'm a couch potato based. I mean, John, my A1C was 12.

Wow.

My, my sugar levels were over 300.

Wow.

So I am, I am, I am.

Lucky to be here.

I should have probably stroked out somewhere along the way, but I just did not take care of myself. So as a result of changing my diet, hiring a nutritionist and understanding what the food groups mean to each other, as you, as you, instead of bringing in this many grams of carbs, we're going to cut that by a third and we're going to bring in more protein. And then as those two together make for a much healthier diet, same thing we do with the fields and the microbes. What can we do to feed that soil to make it as healthy as possible?

You mentioned a very interesting part, which is that you visited an endocrinologist for you, your diabetes. This is important, this is an important point to make that we, most of us do not realize the mode of action, the effective mechanism of most insecticides and the side effects of many fungicides are in the human body, that they are very effective endocrine disruptors. And when you look at the, the, the epidemic, the public health epidemic of all of these degenerative illnesses, this is a very key phrase, degenerative illnesses. So diabe heart disease, stroke, these illnesses that have just exploded in the last couple of decades to levels four to 10 times higher than what they used to be historically. They are all associated with disruptions in the endocrine system. And we get exposed. There is. The permitted safe levels of these toxins in our food supply are known to be orders of magnitude higher than what is required to shift our endocrine system. So when we have these endocrine system imbalances shutting down our thymus gland and thyroid and adrenals and all of these different endocrine system glands, this is what happens as a result of exposure to pesticides, which is something that farmers are exposed to at particularly high levels. When you look at the data of the incidence of cancer and some of these degenerative illnesses in the farming community is at markedly higher risk than the population at large because of their exposure to these toxins. And so I'm living proof.

I mean, I. Like I said, I mean, what kid does not want to come home from school at 14 or 15 that lives on a farm and want to go help dad? I can remember putting insecticide boxes on the planter and wondering why it smelled so bad and why did it have this skull and crossbones on it? So you just Weren't aware of these things. But folks, I'm not doing it. Is our system perfect? By no way is it even close to being perfect. But we're gaining on it every single day. And I am never looking back because this is the way we have to think about farming for the future. We have to be more cognizant of. Of human health.

I'll add one more thought to this, then we can conclude this topic, and that is if you look at the endocrine system and the hormones that are required to balance the system in the human body, if you were to take all the men on the planet and you were to combine the endocrine glands and the hormones in our bodies that are the functional mechanisms or chemical tools of our endocrine system function in part per million and part per billion concentrations, Very tiny concentrations. If you were to take all the men on the planet and take all those hormones and put them together in one place, you would have a total of £70. That's 7 0. Wow. You compare that with a sheer quantity of endocrine disrupting pesticides that are in our food supply, all of a sudden you realize that we have the potential to really screw up the system.

There's no chance.

But as if though that were not enough, the hormonal profile of all the women on the planet is 10% in quantity that of men. It's £7 instead of £70. Which is one of the reasons why often ladies are so much more susceptible to environmental toxins than men are.

That makes total sense. My wife is extremely sensitive. Way more. I mean, she'll do something and she'll go, oh my God, like what? What just happened? You know?

Yeah.

And she got a sniff of something. Someone was spraying something across the road.

Something. Yeah, yeah. Triggers much more easily. Often, not always. Of course, there's exceptions, but as a general rule.

So we have a question.

We probably do have questions. I haven't even been. What happened here? Oh, yeah, we've got lots of questions. Question from Ian Gold. Hi, Ian. Do you believe that the consumer is demonstrating that they are asking for regenerative food at the grocery store? Could a problem be that they cannot understand or trust food labeling?

That's a great question. Ian. Hi, how are you today? Hope you're having a great day. I think there's a little bit of that going on. I think, you know, I think there. If you were to ask me about the six principles of soil health, which one comes to the very top of the list? I think it's tillage I know it's not really stated as tillage. It's minimize disturbance, mean chemistry or tillage. I'm talking about we have to eliminate tillage. And by doing so, we're going to have a soil that is a more healthier soil. We're going to have a more prosperous microbial biome. We're going to have a prosperous and thriving arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. And with that communication going on across the biome, there's going to be transfers of nutrients and minerals and elements at every location within that profile. I think that once the consumer understands that how deep this really is, I think they're going to demand that that's the way this farming is going to have to be done. But that also leads me into another thought here, John. I think part of the problem here is there's not a set definition of regenerative farming. There's not a one single definition that every class can agree on. So how can we be headed for a goal if we don't know what that goal is? I think it's time.

Every time it's time.

There has to be a definition that the consumer agrees on, there has to be a definition the farmer agrees on, and then there has to be a definition that that retailer or processor can agree on. And once that is established, then we are all heading toward this goal. I don't know how that happens, but it needs to happen.

You and I had this conversation some time ago and I see clearly, I see your perspective. And when we think about what happened with organic certification, it took some period of time, like I think it took something like a decade or maybe even two decades for the stakeholders to finally come together and agree on what that definition was. And that then of course has evolved over time.

Right.

The, the one reservation that I have is that any agreed upon definition needs to recognize the journey and not a destination.

I agree.

Because one of the concerns that I have is the moment you create a definition and a certification of standard, then in many cases by default you create an in group and an out group. And this is what happened with organic certification is that there was an in group and an out group and you automatically shut off some people who may have been open to making that transition.

I agree. Totally agree. Absolutely agree. So that's why this definition needs to be accepted by everyone. And it needs to be a definition that maybe evolves over time. You know, we have to abide by the principles of soil health. Let's implement those principles at an increment that is comfortable for you to be at. And then let's start as we get comfortable and we get into the system, we then start to add diversity and we start to then take more and more of those inputs away. Yeah, I could see that as a progression over time.

Yeah. I want to respond to something you said a moment ago about tillage. I'm in general agreement that frequently in many contexts tillage is a significant negative that needs to be resolved. And I also believe that in many cases implementing cover crops can offer faster regeneration than removing tillage. They should be done in combination when at all possible. But I think cover crops actually have a bigger impact. But Rick, we have a really great question here from our conversation earlier on. Community question from Steve Slape. How do you balance building community with making progress? In other words, keeping the core group moving forwards instead of just focusing on catching up with new members, bringing new members up to speed.

That's a great question.

That's a really good question.

You want to take that one first? Yeah, that's a great question. I think my first thought on that would be you have to have a very good support team. Okay. You know, John or I, either one could, or along with many other people could go into a conference, get the whole room energized and then we get in our vehicle and we go home. There needs to be that support group. And I often go back to the state of Wisconsin here. Wisconsin has 41. The last I knew was 41 farmer led soil health groups. Now this is amazing.

Wow, 41.

So I don't know how many counties are in Wisconsin, but I'm going to guess at least 80 or 90. So probably half of the counties have a soil health farmer led group that are constantly building this community, trying to bring in new members and move the whole thing forward into the future. I think that would probably be a model that needs looked at closely. And then again it takes like John's group, it takes support. Those folks get hired, they come in, they help teach the people how to do these things. Not only how to do them today, but how to do them tomorrow and the day after and the day after. And that's important. I think to get established early and have success early is critical to the success of the whole community. Idea.

Yeah, My answer to this question, I'm going to answer it from a very personal perspective. I have found like I'm not really. I've been given many gifts, the capacity to remember a lot of information and connect dots and bring things together. But credit for where I am today and the Work that I'm doing today largely goes to the amazing mentors that I have had. And my personal experience has been that if you reach out and ask for help or ask for support from people, no one has ever told me, no, no one has ever said, I don't have time. And so I've been able to develop this team of mentors that I'm so grateful for. And they all offer different aspects of expertise. Some are really good microbiologists, some are really good at biofuel physics, and some are really good at boosting my spirits and giving me support. And the effort that's required on my part is to maintain a relationship with them, to pick up the phone and have a conversation, just to touch base. And so, from the aspect of moving forward myself, I had to create this community in this peer group around me. And, you know, there is. There's a group that I've participated with for probably a decade or more that Arden Anderson started putting together what he called a private think tank. It's a group of 20 people or so that is a combination of wise elders and young people. And we get together once every year or two, as much as we're able to. So we have this small, closed group that is not focused on bringing new people along, but simply on progressing forward together as a group. And I think the key element that comes to mind in just thinking about this is both of those initiatives require personal initiative. If you want to grow, and if you want to have that community around you, it's up to you to create it. And then the purpose of these larger groups that, like Rick was talking about is on bringing along the many new people, and we need many of those groups, and we need to bring many new people along.

Right. And this is where I'm going to interject my. If I'm even allowed to do this. There. There are six principles of soil health.

Okay.

And the latest one that was added was context. And this is very important because what we're talking about here in. In Northeast Ohio is way different than what would be going on in Texas. Okay. So that's. That's the latest one, But I would like to add, if I'm allowed to another one, I think it needs to be commitment should be another one. You have to be committed to wanting to do this. And once you become committed like that, that helps you with this community. I know that sounds weird, but once you become committed, I mean, we are now starting to see a group of young farmers come on board that are in their probably 30s, that are driving down this same road looking for this same quest. So those folks are already starting to get on board and you start to hear their names rattled around. This is exactly what we need. So, awesome question. Thank you very much for the great question.

Yeah, there's a couple more questions here. Actually, one question I'll respond to quickly, which is, who are the persons you name your mentors? That's a list. And it's important to note also that the list is evolving people. Some people have passed away, and other new people get added to the list all the time, and it's always growing. So some of the recognizable names would be Don Huber and Jerry Hatfield and Michael McNeil and Arden Anderson and Gary Zimmer. Jerry Bonetti has passed away. Bruce Taneo has passed away. Now it's going to be Rick Clark, Lauren Steinlogge. There's a group of amazing peers in this world. You know, we live in a very different world today from what we did even five years ago. There were not the groups of people joining us together on this journey like there are now. Like, if you were willing to take the initiative and reach out, there is no shortage of mentors and no shortage of peers.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's an excellent point, John. Because the other thing, the other side of that is, is we're all extremely transparent.

Yeah.

We try to tell the story from both sides of the equation. You know, I don't use the word failure, so I try to tell some outcomes I didn't expect. And we also try to show some of the highlights that are the positives that, you know, it's like, I don't know if you play golf or not, but you could have your absolute worst round of your life. But if you have one good shot, that's all it takes to get you to come back and try it again next time. So we have to have our validations. And I'm constantly looking for validations on the farm. As you walk around, you've got to take your blinders off and you've got to just start looking around. I mean, one of the first things that I did, my wife wanted to introduce sheep to the farm. Didn't know the first thing about sheep. So the first thing I did was when the sheep came, I went out and I sat down with them and just watched them. I don't know what sheep do. Sheep lay around all morning or most of the morning and all afternoon, and then they go out and graze in the afternoon.

Yeah.

Well, that tells you something, right? So as us being people that Are now say we're going to harvest hay, maybe when's the best time to cut the hay? So you follow what mother Nature is telling you and try to try to live off of that.

That's the very best teacher of all.

Yeah.

And the second best teacher is paying attention to the other people who do that. Right. And this is actually, I'll give you a personal recent example. I've always been passionate about beekeeping. My dream as a teenager, before I started in regenerative agriculture was to be a full time beekeeper. And this, we just moved to a new home this last year and I now have the opportunity to get back into beekeeping and as a sideline or as a large hobby. And so over the last three or four months, I haven't really been active in beekeeping for the last decade. And I know the landscape has changed a lot. There's lots of pest pressure and so forth that wasn't there historically. And so, as is usually my fashion, I did a lot of studying and reading and research and I soon discovered that there were two very different groups of beekeepers. There was one group of beekeepers who always had extra honeybees to sell and they would have usually 90 plus percent overwintering success. There was a second group of beekeepers who consistently had 30 to 40% overwintering loss and they always needed to buy bees. Whose advice are you going to take? Secondly, whose opinion do you care about? I think this is a very important point for us in the agricultural community is we often care about people's opinion that we shouldn't care about. Be very conscious and very deliberate about whose opinion you care and then likewise, be very deliberate about whose advice you want to take. People who are on the same pathway that you are on and who are also care about the same things you care about.

Yeah, John, unfortunately in today's society too many opinions are based on perception. You know, they're perceiving, you know, they drive by our farm, what's that crazy guy doing now? Instead of stopping to ask me what's going on, they just want to turn their nose up and make a perception about what we're doing. Not trying to find the reality of what we're doing.

We're just having a fun conversation here. So I'm going to bring this up. About a decade ago, I was in a really challenging situation where I was supposed to reconcile conflict between two individuals that got along like a cat and a dog. And in this flash of inspiration, I told them that, you know, there are five different realities and the first reality is kind of the ultimate truth where everything is connected to everything else. The second reality is the tiny, infinitesimally small fraction of that total reality that each of us individually gets to experience. The third reality is our perception of what we get to experience. The fourth reality is the stories that we make up in our minds about our perception of the reality we get to experience. And the fifth is the emotions we feel when we believe the stories we make up about our perceptions of the reality we get to experience. That's a bit like the house that Jack built, right? But it's very true. It's that so often we, we have our own internal narrative, we have our own dialogue, we have our own perceptions. Like you can have, you can have a group of adults in a room and two kids start fighting and you ask the adults in the room who started what and what happened. And you, you have six or more, you, you have as many different perceptions of what happened as there are adults in the room. And so I'm not sure what my point is exactly other than to say that we want to care about people's opinions whose perceptions are shaped by the same values that we have. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a good way to end it.

Yeah.

These are great questions, by the way. Great questions.

Yeah. So there's a couple more on food labeling. A follow up question from Ian. I'm in the UK and food labeling rules here often allow marketing that borders on fraud. In my opinion. We can barely even trust country of origin here. We don't even have country of origin, let alone important information around quality or provenance. The successful region farmers I meet in the US are very close to their end consumers. As soon as processors are involved, the added value gets lost.

Yeah, I would say I would be in agreement with that here as well. Is there a market for the regenerative grains that we grow? Not, not close to me. There's not one. So I'll be honest with you. I was toying with getting the regenerative addition onto my organic certification and after reading through the requirements that they're asking for, I thought there's no market for me to do this. So currently I'm not going to do this. Will there be a market? Yes, I'm firm believer that there will be a market for a regenerative farming system.

Let's call it again.

We've got to get to that point though where everyone's in agreement with what does that really look like? And I'm okay, you know, I'm way off to the side. I've taken all inputs away. I'm not doing tillage. Okay, Rick, you're out of your weight. That's fine. I'm, I am, I'm way over here and that's okay. Let's come to an agreement where yes, tillage can be accepted if there's cover crops before and after or something like that.

Yeah.

So I don't know if I answered the question, Ian, but yes, I'm with you. I believe that we are raising more nutrient dense grains than our neighbors are, but they all get dumped into the same bin at the end of the day. So yes, it's a problem.

There's a follow up question from Melissa. Whose responsibility is it to educate consumers so that they can make these decisions in buying better quality food than has been produced following regen principles?

I would think that's going to come straight from the retailer or the processor. You know, I don't want to mention any companies, but I think those companies that are selling the end product to the consumer, that needs to be the platform on where the education starts.

I have a really heretical opinion about this. I've expressed it before, but never in conversation with you. I don't believe that consumer demand drives change in the food and agriculture supply chain. That's a really contrarian point of view. But I've asked people to give me examples and actually I need to add a few qualifiers. I don't believe that positive as compared to negative consumer demand has ever contributed to significant change. And I'm calling significant change anything greater than 30%. So if you consider negative demand, like say salmonella poisoning and spinach, that is negative demand that has an immediate significant impact on the supply chain. But when you think about positive demand, perhaps the best case study that we have of positive demand is organic certification. And today it represents less than 10% of the total supply chain. After being present for 30 years, we don't have the luxury of time. We need to create significant change much faster than that scale. And I don't believe that consumer demand is the pathway to achieving that. Let's say it a different way. If consumer demand drove change in the food supply chain, we would not have tomatoes that resembled cardboard and cantaloupe that were as hard as rocks. They wouldn't exist because no consumer wants to buy that. Just we would all prefer more flavorful tomatoes and cantaloupes and strawberries. But that's not what we get because the distributors need fruit that can be shipped and stored and transported. And it is the distributors and we could include processors to some degree in this, that control and dictate what happens in the supply chain to both the producers and to the consumers.

I can't disagree with that. My wife bought some organic bananas the other day that were so green they had to sit there for 10 days before we could eat them. They were picked that early. That's not what the consumer wants. Yeah, that was making it convenient for that, that, that grower or that processor to pick that crop to get it, easier to ship it and have a longer shelf life to get it to here.

So the obvious question that comes from this, if we're in agreement with that, is how do we get the distributors and processors to have a different perspective? And I have an answer to this question. Let's take strawberries or tomatoes as, or camel, the three that I mentioned as examples. What the distributors desire is shippability and storability. And the perception is the only way they can achieve that is to harvest the fruit when it is immature. But there is a second way, and the second way of achieving that is to produce fruit of such superior quality that is so firm once it's ripe that you can store it and ship it and transport it, get it to the consumer once it's ripe. Now that happens when you have nutrient dense, high quality fruit. We've experienced it hundreds of times on all types of different fruit, but most distributors don't ever get to experience that and they certainly don't get to experience it consistently. So if we want to produce change, then I believe the people we need to educate and the people that we need to give examples of what high quality fruit actually looks like are the distributors and processors. And I'm of course approaching this from a fruit and vegetable production perspective. How do you think this translates to grain?

Well, I think it can, I think you're onto something there. I think you could do the same thing. I mean, I mean you go and you try to listen to your peers and I remember being at a conference somewhere and There was a PhD from Iowa State there talking and he was mentioning that he had the top five foods that had glyphosate in and the number one food was oats. I'm thinking to myself, well, oats aren't.

Even.

Genetic modified crop. So why would oats be high in glyphosate? So I had to raise my hand. Why? Tell me. Well, because it's the way they grow the oats. They desiccate them with glyphosate so that ripe fruit is right there, almost mature. And it gets soaked with glyphosate and soaking it in. Okay. So that right there is an immediate.

Impact on our health and our nutrition.

So that's, I guess, how I would look at it. You need to start looking at systems like that, and you have to change the way that that crop's being grown.

Yeah, yeah.

So there are.

There's lots of really great questions coming through and I want to say thank you to all of you for those, but I want to. I think we're going to move on for the moment because the clock keeps ticking and we're having lots of fun.

I wanted to talk, we wanted to.

Talk a little bit about your farming operation and your crop rotation and some of the stuff that's happening. So tell us about what does your crop rotation look like and what are the areas you would like to evolve?

Yeah, the crop rotation is not a set thing, but I'll go through some of it. For example, when we were starting to transition into organic, to me, the simplest crop to use was alfalfa. We have a dairy that's in our backyard and we can supply alfalfa to that dairy. And so we're not losing that income stream. We're not fighting the weeds that come along with this transition of going away from commercial farming to this organic style of farming. So alfalfa was a perfect fit. So then as we're into the alfalfa, I'm thinking to myself, well, I really want to expand this into minimal tillage. So we started to monkey around with no tilling corn into the standing alfalfa. And the alfalfa at this point would be two years established. So it had been cut every 27 or 28 days for the last two years, except for the winter months. So you can imagine there's no weeds, there's no grass, there's nothing. It's a perfectly clean field. So a, it's number one to start in with the corn crop. So that would be the number one crop to come in behind the alfalfa. Then typically at that point, we might come with soybeans. Now, soybeans are grown in a high cereal rye atmosphere. So we now have to worry about volunteer. So if you're going, and I had this asked to me last week and I was at a conference, the people out in the high plains, how do we, how do we use cereal rye in wheat country? Because we can't have the volunteer rye in with the wheat crop or you're going to get that rejected. So my thought on that would be to Start to incorporate the wheat to become your, your crop that you're going to use as your to be plant your soybeans into.

Okay, so just to clarify, you're, you're planting cover crop rye following the corn and then going into beans after that, right?

That's, that's correct. Okay. So then the one thing that I really found that again, everything that I've done on this farm, John, is because of Mother Nature and where she has pushed me to go.

So when we started, how much pushing was required? A lot. A lot.

I, you know, if you want to be humble, you just think you got this figured out and then she will humble you in a moment's notice. So with that being said, I decided I wanted to see how much nutritional value was being sequestered by these cover crops. So, yes, when you, when you terminate cereal, rye at 12 inches tall, there's quite a few nutrients there, but there's a lot more to go if you just let it go another 25 or 40, 25 to 40 more days before you terminate. And once you get to that now, you're starting to recycle, regenerate these nutrients that are deep down within the profile.

Yeah. I remember seeing your daylight. I was really intrigued that you were. You're actually pulling forage tests or tissue tests every, every week or every two.

Weeks now we're doing it every Monday.

You're doing it every week?

Every Monday.

Wow.

Yeah. So what I'm trying to do is, and we go out and we measure out a 2 foot by 2 foot square and we clip it off at the ground level and we put all that biomass in a bag and we ship it to the lab. Now the reason why we're doing a two foot by two foot square is because then we know what part of an acre that is. So when we get the numbers back from the lab, we can translate it into an acre.

All right, so just for clarification, Rick is doing this on his cover crops to measure the nutrient contained in the COVID crop biomass.

Above ground only. I don't know how to measure below ground yet. I don't because roots are going everywhere, everywhere. I don't know how to do that. So we're just doing above ground only. I'm trying to answer your rotation question. I'm taking a long winded approach here. So by, but by letting these, these cover crops grow far into their maturity, we're maximizing what we intended for them to do for us. So by doing that, though, there's always unintended consequences and Those unintended consequences, one of them would be you're going to have seeds that get fertilized because we are terminating cereal, rye at anthesis or when the pollen is being shed or dropped onto those viable seeds. So some of those are going to get fertilized and they're going to be volunteers next year. We have to keep that in mind. So if you're going to follow soybeans with a wheat crop, you better have an alternate plan to get rid of that crop. Then go to your local elevator because they're going to reject every load. Okay, so alfalfa, corn, soybeans, wheat. Then probably we're going to pack in behind the wheat. You do not double crop soybeans. We're going to pack in behind wheat. A massive warm season cocktail, because we rarely get to do that in Indiana. Plant a warm season cocktail and then we're going to come in with a cocktail that will be for the crop that you're going to plant the following year. So let's say you roll back into corn.

This is my warm season cocktail.

There you go. Water. Water. But diversity. I look at diversity as three different things. I look at diversity as you used to plant a monoculture, which we got to be careful here. We can do monocultures and cover crops just like we do monocultures and cash crops. So cereal, rye, every year is not a good thing. That's no diversity at all. So you go from there up to a 12 way cocktail. That's diversity. That's one way I look at diversity. Another way that I look at diversity, I don't think we think about this enough is annuals and perennials. Because if you look back at the cocktails we create, they're almost all consist of annuals. Well, that's only interest to some part of that microbial biome. I don't know which part it it is, but I just know there's only one part. So we've got to think how we, how can we incorporate the perennials into that. Now if you're going to go down the road that I'm on and everything is being mechanically terminated, we have to be careful what perennials we pick because they may become problems.

Which ones have become problems?

Chicory. Chicory. Oh my goodness.

Chicory.

I don't really. You don't realize how proliferant chicory is until you get it started in your system with no tillage or no chemistry. It's very difficult. So that's why I lean on folks like you, Nicole Masters. How can we Deal with the, the problem and look at it as a natural problem. How are we going to combat it? Naturally, not, not with brute force.

You need more sheep.

Need more sheep? Yes. I think sheep would be an answer.

Yeah.

Okay. That's the two, that's two of the ways I look at diversity. The third way I look at diversity is cash crop. I think we need to start, and we're doing this now, we need to start raising multiple cash crops at the same time and either A, find an end user that will take them as a commingled product, or B, we need to separate them out.

Yeah. And the technology exists today to do that affordably.

You've got, you've got shaker screens, you've got air, you've got color sorters, you've got all kinds of things that can do this. But I think if you do those three things I'm talking about, you've absolutely maximized the amount of diversity that we can throw at this system. Because here's what I think's happening. When you, when you think about a system that has been in high tillage and high fertility and high chemistry, and you now pull that out of that system and start thinking about being in a regenerative system, the, the actions that have taken place with the tillage and the, and the fertilizers and the chemistry have absolutely turned off and shut down massive amounts of microbes in the profile. We now need to turn them back on and we need to let them do their jobs again because too much of the time they've gone dormant. They don't have a job. So if, if we can continue to build this diversity in, we are constantly going to be turning on more portions of this microbial biome.

So I don't want to lose sight of our rotation discussion. You took the long way around the mountain.

I took a long way.

You mentioned planting your corn into alfalfa, but you didn't mention alfalfa in your rotation. So what happens after wheat? Are you going back to alfalfa or what does that look like?

After the wheat, we will probably do a grazing period. If, if we have the infrastructure in place, then after grazing, depending on the weather that we have and, and the rotation that I want to be in, we'll probably go back to corn at that point. If we don't go back to corn at that point, I will probably then go into a region. Because what's, what's hard region is when you take an acre out of production and you give it that massive cocktail that you want Multiple times in a year. You start off with the cool season, move into a warm season, then you give it the cocktail that you want to raise corn next year. That's when you're going to come back into corn. Because where we live and where I am in the world is I'm in west central Indiana and I'm right in line with the Iowa, Missouri border. I'm right on that border. So just come straight east into Indiana, right on the Illinois line. That's where we're farming. Okay. From there north, it's very difficult to get the timing right to have a cocktail package prescribed for a successful corn crop next year to be able to feed it the fuel that it needs to raise corn. So we have to do that behind a cereal grain, behind in livestock, or behind a region year. Now, I don't know if I've answered your question, John, because there really isn't any set rotation that I'm working on because I don't have fence built on every acre.

Yeah.

I don't have those infrastructures in place. So we've got to, we've got to kind of shift this thing. And I'll be honest with you, sometimes decisions are also based on market conditions. I mean, right now there is an extreme shortage of organic soybeans and the market is gone bonkers. So I'll be honest with you, we are probably going to shift a few more acres into beans next year than we probably should. Is that building soil health? Probably not to the fullest, yeah.

So in this general cropping system, understanding that you're making adaptations all the time, what are the areas that you would still like to evolve? Where are the, where are the challenges in the system?

The challenges in this system is, number one, when you plant corn. And I don't care if you're planting corn into standing alfalfa or you're planting corn into 13,000 pounds of biomass of a legume package. I don't care which of those it is. We are changing the physiological structure of that corn.

What does that look like?

It is elongated. The nodes are extremely elongated. It's very cylindrical. It is very weak looking. We're not getting a very good root system down in this first three or four weeks of life. We need to figure out how do we maximize or. No, that's not the right word. How do we hinder that plant development and when, I mean plant the corn plants development in that first three weeks of life, how can we augment that and make it better?

So you're getting the elongation because the corn plant has to go through the mulch really quickly. It's got lots of mulch.

That's right.

How deep is your residue?

If you lay down £13,000 of a legume consisting of clover and vetch, it's probably in that 8 to 10 inch neighborhood of depth.

Yeah.

So you're not walking across the field after it's been rolled. You're high stepping because you'll trip and fall if you don't. Yeah, we don't use any row cleaners on the, on the planter because I don't want to open up a spot for weeds to start to come through. Yeah, I have a 70, 30 rule that I like to abide by. 70% of the weed suppression is coming from the COVID crop that we plant and the 30% of the balance of suppression is coming from the cash crop canopy. So with that being said, we are on 20 inch row spacing corn and 20 inch row spacing soybeans. Now I think we need to start thinking about with our soybeans. We are definitely going to drill some more beans next spring and we're going to get more density.

Just for the shading. Yes, just for the shading, yeah. So what, what color are your corn seedlings? When they come out of the ground or when they. I should say maybe when they come out of the residue.

When they come out of the residue they are that pale green color. They haven't, it's like they're not fully healthy. They haven't absorbed much nitrogen at this point. They just look like they're behind.

And you also mentioned that you don't have large root biomasses at this stage. Why is that?

I don't know. I think it's because we've changed this physiological structure of the plant. It's doing all it can to reach for the sky and it's not trying to send anything down. So now we are vulnerable for any weather event that mother nature wants to bring our wine. And we're probably becoming more vulnerable for a pest issue at this point as well. So does this happen every time? No, but once. What we're trying to do now is we're trying to no till corn into the alfalfa. We wait till the corn is up to V1, V2 and then we roll it flat with the roller, crimper, alfalfa and corn and the corn just bounces right back up. Now what we're trying to do is get the corn able to see the sunlight sooner and start it growing like we think it should grow. Driving roots down into the system, what.

Seed sources are using immediately. When you start speaking about corn emerging to sunlight and it's pale green, I mean, obviously that spells trouble in a lot of ways. And that's something that can be fixed with nutrition and seed treatments or infer or whatever is appropriate context. But the reality is that if you have really good seed quality with nutrient dense seed, then the, the objective should be to get corn seed out or corn plants, seedlings into the sunlight that are dark green and take off and go from 0 to 60 in 30 seconds. That's right. And so that should be achievable when we have good quality seeds. The next question is, what does your seed quality look like?

Yeah, I will admit I think our seeds have been very small. I think they're smaller than they used to be. I never really thought about it until I reached out and grabbed a bag off the skid and I can one hand the bag off and I look at it. It weighs 46 pounds. I think we're losing a lot from the get go of when we put.

The seed in the ground. So you're not producing your own seed?

Not yet. But I think that this is where we're going to, this is where we're headed. We started with soybeans. This is what I'm, you know, this is our epigenetics here. We are seeing inherited changes within a, a variety without at all introducing any change to the DNA. And what I mean by that is I feel like if you continue to use a seed within your system and never bring in another seed to it, you are going to, that seed is going to change and become more adaptable to your system. So now we got to be careful here because you can't do this with current genetics because there's trade laws we can't do this to. So what we've done is we've gone back 30 years and we found genetics that have come off patent and we sent them to South America, we grew them out, we brought the grow outs to the U.S. they grew out, those grow outs were grown in Lafayette, Indiana. And now we have £2,000 of 10 varieties of soybeans that are off patent and we can do whatever we want with them. This is to me the way of the future for our farm. We are going to raise genetics that will change and adapt to our system, our soil, our fertility, everything we're trying to do and we're going to. We've now done the same thing with corn. They were planted last week in South America. Now Corn is a lot more difficult because of the pollen issues and whatnot. But, but John, these, these things are worth it. You have to, you know, you sit back and I think about, you know, maybe the open pollinators, they're already there.

Right.

You know, they're, they're hundreds of years old. So I just feel like we're behind the eight ball by the seed that we're planting today.

We are, yes. I strongly agree with you for two reasons. One is that when you speak to the breeders who were breeding corn, propagating corn at the time of the introduction of GMOs, there was widespread knowledge and familiarity with the fact that if you took one of those present top hybrids at that day, or any of those hybrids and you inserted traits into it, you developed it into a traited variety, the introduction of GMO traits would cause a yield drag that was significant. 20 to 30 bushels per acre. That was 30 years ago. That was mainstream knowledge. And of course that was a problem. And so very rapidly they eliminated side by side genetics. You couldn't buy the same variety both treated and untreated because they didn't want that comparison to be happening. Yeah. So that's a problem. But there's another problem today, which is small seed and seed that.

Many of.

You are familiar with how corn seed is grown. You think about what we want. We know that the goal should be to plant a seed and have it germinate in a matter of days, take off the ground, take out the ground, sprout and grow like crazy. But I actually have a colleague that collected over 400 seed samples from seed companies, this is probably four or five years ago, and grew them out in a greenhouse environment, optimal temperatures, water, optimal conditions. 380 plus of those 400 varieties took over 11 days to germinate. That's a problem. And it is. That problem is a function of how seed corn is produced. First we detassel it by chopping off the top third of the plant just before pollination. So we've eliminated a lot of photosynthesis and then as soon as that seed grain approaches maturity, where it has a viable endosperm and can germinate, we want the smallest seed possible. So now the plant is killed sometimes with paraquat, but more frequently with a sodium chloride application, so it's burned down with salt. And now you have this very small, lightweight seed that has low nutritional density, it doesn't want to germinate and doesn't want to grow. So a big part of the problem, I believe of the challenges that we have with corn seed and corn production in general is that we just have crappy quality seed.

Right. And I think another thing. And again, I would offer any help here, anybody who's listening, we need to find. And for lack of a better term, we need to find genetics that are mycorrhizal in nature.

Okay.

So I don't know if that's the right way to say it, but I think you know what I mean. We need to find those genetics that want to build that community with the microbial biome, the fungi in particular, and then they can seek out the nutrients and the fuel, as I call it, that that particular plant needs.

Right.

And I am afraid that. That some of those attractions are even being bred out of the current genetics that we are potentially buying.

I. I can't name any names, but I heard of conversations where that was a deliberate intent of modern breeding workers to disassociate that mycorrhizal association.

And that's. That's scary dangerous. Scary dangerous.

Well, it's. It is. The intent is to produce crops that are required. The only source of nutrition is soluble nutrition. So now there is no alternative except to use fertilizers. Right?

That's right. And that's what we're trying. That's why we're trying so hard. We have not introduced a synthetic fertilizer on our farm for eight years now. We are trying to become less and less dependent on all of those attributes. Whether these things that we're hearing are true or not, I don't know. But I do know that I do not want to plant the latest and greatest thing that the seed dealer has to offer. That's not what I want to plant.

Yeah. Yeah. So actually, going back to the discussion about the way corn seed is grown in its nutritional integrity. So when we buy seed, the workaround for today's environment and the world that we live in is if we are getting this small seed that is low test weight and that doesn't contain the manganese and the iron and the zinc that it needs to come out of the ground rapidly and be dark green and take off and grow very well. Grow wide leaves, dark green leaves, then that's where the inferral applications come. And that's what we've been doing at aea. Our objective is to have a corn seedling come out of the ground and be dark green without adding any nitrogen. And that's very achievable. Boy, is it fun. Yeah.

See, and that's. That's why, again, You've got to build your community. You've got to make your community bigger. I'm making my community bigger by coming to talk to you. Having a blast here today talking about this. But then we will be talking about the products that you have to offer.

Yeah, yeah, there's.

And I know, John, this puts you in a hard spot because you want to help people, but yet you don't want them to think you're a salesman. And you're not. You're not a salesman. You have never once asked me about your products. I asked you about products.

It's an interesting dance that I walk because I really passionate. The reason we're having this conversation, the reason I host the podcast is to share information and make it widely available. And it's. I do talk about products in the context of the experience that I've had, but it's. I think that. We are all in this regenerative agriculture community. We are all in general agreement that the objective, the place we want to arrive is we want to develop agricultural ecosystems and management systems which are not dependent on outside inputs to the greatest degree possible. Within that you ask the question, well, there are farmers such as Rick and such as Gabe Brown and such as Dave Brandt and many others who have been successful at just completely eliminating inputs. They just stopped using them and with good benefits, economic benefits and so forth. And the place where I see these nutritional products and these microbial inoculants being effective is they actually speed up the regeneration of the overall system. So when you think about the amazing stories that gauge shares of developing soils with this deep profiles of biology where you have half the soil being pore space down to a depth of 40 inches, that process on those specific soils and blocks may have taken him 20 years to achieve that. And what we observe is we can achieve that same type of development perhaps in five years or 10 years instead of in 20 years. And you arrive at the same place, but you get there much faster.

And that could be valuable to a lot of people because people want to get there now.

Right.

And we need to get there now.

We don't have the luxury of time.

Our system is very fragile and it's ready to crack. So time is of the essence.

Yeah, yeah.

We got any other questions?

Oh, I'm sure we've got lots of questions. Where did we go here? There was a question on your cover crop biomass, when you're talking about your biomass being crushed down £13,000, is that dry matter or wet pounds?

That's dry matter. That's dry Matter calculation's been made.

What does that translate to in wet piles?

Well, what probably 20, 20 something. 20 something thousand pounds. I can't do that math real quick in my head.

What's the moisture content?

What do they take?

It'll probably be 60, 50. 60% on alfalfa.

Yeah, it's probably.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Perhaps maybe 70.

Yeah, yeah. Question from John Warmerdam. Hi John. Would a spray of rejuvenate on the crimped crop speed up decay and nutrient availability as it breaks down? Seems like either the corn is missing nutrients early on or the shade makes it grow like a grass plant in the shade, seeking light and focusing only on upright growth. Thank you John. Great, great observations, Great thoughts.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

The answer is yes, that a spray on of rejuvenate is really going to speed up the decomposition of that crop residue. And in fact it may do that too much early on because what you want to happen is you want that crop residue to break down and volatilize as carbon dioxide while you have a green growing plant to capture it. So what does your decay cycle look like right now?

Well, right now we are. We have put down so much that you could walk out into a field and still probably see some cover crop from last year, remnants of it.

So. As in 18 months ago. Yeah.

So that's probably too slow of a breakdown.

Yeah.

I feel like though, see, I am always trying to figure out how are we going to combat or suppress the weeds. And it's not so much the broad leads. I truly believe there's progression taking place here. We've progressed out of the broadleaf fear of a broadleaf taking a field over into now the foxtail taking over. And that's what happens sometimes. So I attributed that to being out of balance. We don't have the right mechanisms in place to bring forward the calcium that we may need because I'm confident the calcium is there but it maybe it's not available for the plant to take up. There's a big difference between taking a soil test and seeing you got calcium versus can the plant take it up.

Right.

And I think that's kind of where we are right now. So yeah, I. Rick is going to.

Be happy to hear that his foxtail is going to be gone in 24 months once we start working with him. That's a promise.

That's. That's good. That's good. That's worth the whole trip coming today folks. And I'll keep you in tune on that. But there's there's so many things, John, that I don't understand now. I don't need to understand them all, but I like to. But I just know that we have to constantly be throwing diversity and crop rotation. We have to. And once we steer away from that, we're setting ourselves up for trouble.

Yeah, yeah. So there's a couple more good questions here, but I want to follow up on the second part of your question, John, or comment is it seems like the corn is missing nutrients early on. Yes, I believe that it is. It's almost certainly missing the trace minerals and the proteins that it needs to have that dark green color right from the get go. To your point about having less root biomass. In my opinion that is also a nutritional issue because the way sugars are partitioned in that early stage of growth, even while the plant is struggling to photosynthesize from limited. Actually, let's back up just a step. When I heard myself say that plants actually have the capacity to photosynthesize from infrared light in when they have the right nutrition and so they don't have to have full access to sunlight and they can still be dark green. There's many examples of when you have plants that have really good nutrition and a solid canopy, let's say alfalfa that's 30 inches tall, you can have a solid canopy and they can be green all the way down. And those bottom leaves, lower leaves, are still photosynthesizing from infrared. I see. So that can happen with these corn seedlings when they have the right nutrition. And it's also the carbohydrate partitioning from the original seed as well as from what happens from photosynthesis. The quantity that has shifted from new growth to root systems is also determined by the nutritional profile and particularly by cobalt, which is one of those elements that people don't really talk about. But if you supply adequate levels of cobalt, the cobalt will concentrate in the growing root tips and it will move a larger proportion of sugars down into the root system to grow a larger root biomass. So you can really determine, you can have a plant. Let's take a soybean plant. We can have a soybean plant that naturally wants to grow nodes at a 6 inch spacing and shift the nutritional profile to have nodes at a 2 inch spacing. Or we can do the opposite. You can really shift that with nutrition management.

Well, that makes sense then on why you see these variations in from field to field.

Yeah, yeah.

You'll see some, some nodes stacked and some nodes that aren't stacked. So we've got a nutritional imbalance in field A versus field B. That makes total sense.

Yeah.

I mean, part of the things that I wrestle with too, John, are I'm trying to do this to scale. So I've got to figure out ways that we can do this across thousands of acres with big equipment. And sometimes that approach isn't always the best. And we no longer look at single snapshots in time. We look at average and we look at. We don't look at that. Why did the Smith 120. Why was it this way when the Brown 80 over here was this way? Well, we can almost always find an answer why. And one of those answers is because we couldn't get to this field in the right amount of time.

Yeah.

So that makes a big difference here.

Yeah.

Again, context. So we have to keep all this in mind. Sometimes I wish we had less acres and I could really hone in hard on, on fewer acres. But we're not there right now. We're where we are and that's what we're going to deal with. So we'll figure this out.

Well, I'm sure you've already experienced this and the effects continue to compound. You already have systems that are more resilient in regards to timing sensitivity than they were four or five.

Very much so.

And that will continue. Our experience has been that, okay, let's say we resolve this seed quality issue on corn. And we. The way we resolve it is we put a row starter in place that contains the trace minerals that should be in the seed but that aren't there, and the roots absorb it right away and we get this crop response. The effect of that is, again, it'll give you additional resiliency in getting into the field. Because all of a sudden, because the corn plant seedling takes off that much faster, you now have a longer window of time to get in. And that's just another effect of adding more resilience.

And see, that's a big deal.

That's a very big deal.

That's a really big deal when you're talking about scale.

Yeah.

So there's so many synergies that, that, that we're not taking advantage of and, and those synergies are happening. And that's why I like this co mingling of cash crops, you know, or relay, you know, cereal, rice, soybeans. I like these concepts because you're, you've got different microbes functioning and performing different actions that they might not do in a monoculture system.

Right.

So we've got to do everything we can to turn as much of this on as we. As we possibly can.

Yeah, yeah. So we have a couple more really good questions coming through regarding weed control. Various aspects of weed control. First question is here from Laron. Geisting or Geisting. I know you. I know we've met, but I don't remember how to pronounce your last name. I apologize. Rick mentioned foxtail. What does the presence of foxtail indicate? I had a near solid stand of foxtail this year after light tillage to plant green cover seed. Milton Banks, that's yours. That's fine. Well, when you read the books, the books will say that foxtail is present in compacted soil that has low calcium availability. The key phrase is calcium availability. There is, in this case, there is no context between the presence of calcium supply and actual calcium availability to the crop. So in my opinion, that is an incomplete assessment. And it is the microbial profile soil that actually has a bigger impact on the germination of seeds than the presence or absence of calcium supply. So I just made the comment that once we begin working with Rick, the foxtail is going to be gone in 24 months. And I'm fairly confident in that assessment. And our tools for managing it are going to be twofold. One is we're going to elevate boron levels in the soil supply and soil profile significantly. I'm going to want to be somewhere in the neighborhood of at least two and a half, preferably three parts per million. The effect that will have is dramatically increased calcium availability. That's kind of an easy step. The second easy step is to use our soil primer or rejuvenator. You can dramatically quickly change the soil microbial profile and foxtail is no longer going to be an issue. So the question is, what's the next weed going to be in your soybeans?

I don't know. I guess if you, if you believe in progression, it's shrubs and trees.

We don't want to go there. Quite.

No, not yet.

No.

But, you know, I think the more I think about this, John, I think when we now incorporate. Okay, so let me ask you a question. Do you think that you could accomplish everything that you just said without a cover crop program to help mitigate or suppress those weeds, Some of those weeds.

Could we resolve foxtail pressure without the use of COVID crops? Yes. You think so? Yeah, we've done it already.

Okay. So if we were to incorporate £120 to the acre of fall drilled cereal rye with your program, we should be Just about wheat free.

It's possible. That's important. Let's find out.

We're going to. Yeah, this is the type of stuff I wanted this to evolve into. This is, this is, I think what our listeners are wanting this conversation we're having.

Yeah, good questions. There's another question here from Curtis. What other cover plants besides chicory are hard to deal with using mechanical termination.

Rape or canola, plantain, alfalfa. I mean, alfalfa does not want to die. That's all there is to it. It just wants to continue to live. Those are primary and then grass, you know, your, your, your perennial grasses, of course, low lying clovers like your Dutch clover. I mean there's a lot of talk about trying to establish a perennial system and then plant corn. I mean that's hard. That is hard. And I'm not. I've got a good friend of mine, Dan De Sutter has worked on this. And again, this is about community. I didn't want to do that. Dan worked on it. I don't want to work on it. It's awfully hard. I've got other things I want to focus on right now. But to answer the question, you seem.

To have an appetite for hard things though.

Oh, I do. If you want me to do something, tell me I can't it do doing it. And I'm going to try. We will get there one day. But I do know that that chicory will absolutely swallow up your, your corn and just suffocate it. It will. So I've got, I've got two experiments going on. One is with sheep and one is with alfalfa. I'm thinking that if. And we put on £27 to the acre of alfalfa.

Whoa.

Into the worst field that I've got of chicory and I'm wanting to suffocate and smother the chicory out with the alfalfa and it's going to get cut every 27 or eight days. And I'm thinking we can take care of the chicory that way.

Another cover crop that I think would be able to do that, but I don't know how it fits in. The rest of your system would be sorghum sedan grass.

Okay.

That's pretty, pretty effective at choking most weeds out.

Okay, well, I'll keep that in mind. I try to add that into every cocktail we use because of its mycorrhizal growth ability to grow the mycorrhizal or to give those stimulants that, that, that biome wants I Learned that from Dr. Chris Nichols. One day I got the pleasure to listen to her speak and. And she was highly recommending Sorghum Sudan into mycorrhizal situations.

Yeah. There's a question here from earlier in our conversation from Cheryl. We are in transition from conventional farming to regenerative. We stopped tilling. We stopped using fungicides, seed treatments and insecticides. We are in the process of reducing fertilizers and herbicides. Our biggest issue are weeds and degraded knolls in our fields. What was your experience with weeds when you began your transition?

It was bad. The weeds were bad. But I'm telling you, folks, this is where a lot of people disagree with me. If we can stop tillage and leave these weed seeds on top, they will degradate, they will be eaten by microbes, it will be eaten by varmints. They will just simply disappear.

You know, the biggest consumer of weed seed? Earthworms. Earthworms, yeah.

Leave them there. I mean, if you go out and look at our earthworm counts, I think the math. I did this with Mitchell Hora one day. I think the math we worked out was a little over 3 million worms per acre. When you, when you bring up a set like we did 6 inches by 6 inches by 6 inches, counted the worms in that 6 inch cube, that's.

Like 60 worms per square foot.

It's a bunch. Yeah, we kind of like 20 something in a 6 by 6 inch by 6 inch.

Wow.

So it worked out to be like 40 or 40 to 40 to 45 worms per square foot.

Wow.

Yeah. So that when you, when you have that kind of activity, you have the kind of water infiltration rates that we have. I mean, I had the privilege of having our soil health specialists, state specialists, come to the farm this summer. They did two or three tests on the farm. Our water infiltration rate right now are between 15 and 20 inches of rain an hour. That's our infiltration rate.

Wow.

Our aggregate stability depth now is almost 7 inches.

Wow.

And when you couple all of these things together and you, you strive to, to, to get to this point. I know I asked you a loaded question earlier about controlling weeds without any cover crops, and you said, we can do it. That's great. But I don't, I don't recommend it.

You gave me one specific weed depiction.

I did, I did foxtail.

Yeah.

We have to have the COVID crops to armor the soil.

Yeah.

We have to.

In a concept. General. Yeah. If you want to control weeds as a general population, you have to include.

Cover crops Yeah, I didn't mean to set you up for a trap there, but I was curious what your answer was going to be. But that's. That's interesting to me that if we could suppress foxtail without a cover crop, because, see, you have to think about the way I look at this is we can't get everything done on time. We finished planting cereal rye on December 5th. What do you think that cereal rye is going to look like next spring compared to what was planted on September 5th? There'll be no comparison.

Right.

So with that in mind, we now need the arsenal that you have to work on those acres because we're not going to have the biomass.

Yeah. So there are some weed species that are relatively easy to manage by shifting the microbial profile and mineral profile. Foxtails would be one of them. And then there are others that are very persistent even as soil biology and the mineral profile improves, like pigweed and lamb's quarter and so forth.

Now, we do not have those weeds very, very prevalent because I think it's due to the fact.

Cover crop.

Yeah, it's. It's the diversity in the COVID crop. I mean, John, I think there's a day coming and maybe you're. Maybe you're already working on this. We're going to sit down and we're going to answer 10 questions. You know, what's the cash crop you just came out of? What are you. What's the cash crop you're going into? What are the three or four weeds you want to attack? And five or six other questions. What's your fertility? What's. How much of. How much magnesium do you have? Whatever these questions are. And then you're going to build a cocktail of specific species that will target that environment.

We already have some of those pieces coming together. I think one of the other important questions. I know you didn't intend to be comprehensive, but one other very important question to be a part of that is what is your pathogen profile and what disease suppression do you want to develop?

Yes.

Yeah.

That's going to be critical for the future success here.

Yeah. So there's actually a question related to this coming from. Through. From Seth. What factors do you take into consideration when you are selecting your cover crop mixes? Are you looking at a soil test, next year's cash crop, time of planting?

Everything. Everything you just mentioned, Seth. We no longer use the traditional soil tests. We are solely using the. The Rick Haney soil health test. Now that may change. I'm going to visit with John. I'm not sure what John Does? We're going to find out. But currently, I like the Haney soil health test. But now remember folks, it's no different than any other test we take. It's a snapshot in time. Did it rain an inch the day before you took the test? Did it rain an inch after you took the test? I mean, there are so many variables here that can alter these soil tests we take. I don't care whose test it is. So what we do is we look at trends. What is the trend of organic carbon? What's it doing? What's the trend of organic nitrogen? What's the trend of organic matter? What's the trend of our CO2 bursts? These are the things we look at. So you have to collect data to be able to baseline and then come up with these solutions.

I can't tell you how important what Rick just said is. I've been a big champion of the use of SAP analysis and I don't, I don't need to repeat all the things that I've said. But the value of SAP analysis is in collecting data consistently through the season. And of all the pieces that I learned about Rick's operation, the piece that impressed me the most was collecting cover crop biomass residue throughout the entire season. This is not just when the crop is alive and before it gets crimped, but all the way through the entire season until harvest. I think you're doing it.

You're doing all the into November. That's right.

And so that means Rick actually knows what the nutritional value, peak of his cover crop residue is, what the peak nutrient supply is and how those nutrients degrade. So he knows exactly what nutrition his cover crop is contributing to his crop at every stage throughout the growing season. That's incredibly valuable data that every one of you needs to have on your crops and your cover crops as well. There is no replacement for that knowledge. And when you have that knowledge and someone tries to sell you fertilizer, you can say, I don't need this because I already have more than you can sell me.

Right. And I'll tell you to continue that on John, to see it go into total defoliate or, you know, dying and degradation and then the release. Yeah, it's amazing to see which nutrients release and which ones get still can be tied up. Number one is nitrogen. Nitrogen wants to hang with cereal rye, for example, longer. And it obviously has to do with the carbon to nitrogen ratio.

Yeah, that's some of it.

So you have to understand what's happening here. You know, so many times people say you can't plant corn into cereal. Right. What?

You can.

And once you understand that the nitrogen is being tied up. So if you can move nitrogen forward into the system, all the better to plan.

Yeah. This actually brings us back to John Ormerdam made a comment earlier about the use of rejuvenate, spraying it onto crop residue. This is a tool for those of you who have experience with it. For those of you who don't, I apologize. You're really missing out. Sorry, Rick.

Sorry. I've been missing out.

I'm just going to be a product champion for a moment. There is no competitor of Rejuvenate that is so effective. It will dramatically speed up the rate of crop decomposition or crop residue decomposition. Cover crop residue decomposition. That was what it was originally designed for. We actually growers that we work with on the plains who need to maintain crop residue for wind erosion resistance can't use rejuvenator. They have to be very careful how they use it because it makes residue disappear. It gets decomposed very quickly. And this crop residue isn't just volatilized into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, like it is when you add liquid nitrogen, for example. So you can spray crop residue with liquid nitrogen. Of course, it disappears very quickly.

Right.

But you don't build soil biology very much because you're just narrowing the carbon and nitrogen ratio too much. With rejuvenate, you don't have that. You build soil biology or soil organic matter very quickly, and you also release a flush of carbon dioxide. Well, we have gone well over 90 minutes. This has been a fun conversation. There's still questions that have come through that we haven't gotten to. Actually, there's a question here from Lauren that we'll get to. Hi, Lauren.

Hi, Lauren.

Thoughts on manure in our systems, live or stored? Can we get the system going too hot like you're describing rejuvenate?

Hmm. I think we probably can.

Well, I think we certainly can get it hot enough where residue doesn't stick around and doesn't last or even manure doesn't last. Like, I was having a conversation with Nicole Masters last week where she was describing a manure patty that had 700 dung beetles and was disappearing in four to six hours.

Wow. Wow.

Yeah.

Wow. That's fast.

That's fast.

Yeah. I think we can get. I think we can get the thing in hyperdrive. Lauren, one thing I will definitely say, if you're going to incorporate any kind of manure, you have to do it with a cover crop present to help be that sponge and to help soak it up and grab a hold of those nutrients and not let them leach away.

Yeah, yeah, completely agree.

And I really think that.

When we have stored manure, stored manure needs to be managed, and it can be managed or mismanaged to either be a tremendous positive or to be a negative. So often liquid manure in particular is a significant negative and even dry manure is often a negative. And they can be a positive. I mean, you could take liquid manure and turn it into the best quality compost to use you can possibly imagine. But most of it sucks. And there's the only difference between the two is the ways that you manage it.

Yeah, great question. Thanks, Lauren.

Yeah, so my family has just arrived home. They're giving us the signal that it's time to wrap things up. So I want to say.

Awesome, thank you.

Thanks for all of you who joined.

Thank you very much.

We're going to have more conversations like this. Thank you for coming to visit.

You're welcome. Thank you for the great questions, everyone. I hope this is what you folks were looking for.

Place where I see these nutritional products and these microbial inoculants being effective is they actually speed up the regeneration of the overall system. So when you think about the amazing stories that Gabe shares of developing soils with these deep profiles of biology where you have half the soil being pore space down to a depth of 40 inches, that process on those specific soils and blocks may have taken him 20 years to achieve that. And what we observe is we can achieve that same type of development perhaps in five years or 10 years instead of in 20 years. And you arrive at the same place, but you get there much faster.

And that could be valuable to a lot of people because people want to get there now.

Right.

And we need to get there now.

We don't have a lot of time.

Our system is very fragile and it's ready to crack.

Right.

So time is of the essence.

Yeah, yeah.

We got any other questions?

Oh, I'm sure we've got lots of questions. Where did we go here? There was a question on your cover crop biomass. When you're talking about your biomass being crushed down £13,000, is that dry matter or wet pounds?

That's dry matter.

That's dry matter.

That calculation's been made.

What does that translate to in wet pounds?

Well, what, probably 20, 20 something, 20 something, thousand pounds. I can't do that math real quick in my head.

What's the moisture content?

What do they take?

It'll probably be 60, 50, 60% on alfalfa.

Yeah, it's probably.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Perhaps maybe 70. Yeah, yeah.

Question from John Warmerdam. Hi, John. Would a spray of rejuvenate on the crimped crop speed up decay and nutrient availability as it breaks down? Seems like either the corn is missing nutrients early on or the shade makes it grow like a grass plant in the shade, seeking light and focusing only on upright growth. Thank you, John. Great, great observations. Great thoughts.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

The answer is yes, that a spray on of rejuvenate is really going to speed up the decomposition of that crop residue. And in fact it may do that too much early on. Because what you want to happen is you want that crop residue to break down and volatilize as carbon dioxide while you have a green growing plant to capture it. So what does your decay cycle look like right now?

Well, right now we are. We have put down so much that you could walk out into a field and still probably see some cover crop from last year, remnants of it.

So. As in 18 months ago. Yeah, yeah.

So that's probably too slow of a breakdown.

Yeah.

I feel like though, see, I am always trying to figure out how are we going to combat or suppress the weeds. And it's not so much the broadleaves. I truly believe there's progression taking place here. We've progressed out of the broadleaf fear of a broadleaf taking a field over into now the foxtail taking over. And that's what, that's what happens sometimes. So I attributed that to being out of balance. We don't have the right mechanisms in place to. To bring forward the calcium that we may need. Because I'm confident the calcium is there, but it maybe it's not available for the plant to take up. There's a big difference between taking a soil test and seeing you got calcium versus can the plant take it up.

Right.

And I think that's kind of where we are right now.

So. Yeah, I. Rick is going to be happy to hear that his foxtail is going to be gone in 24 months once we start working with him. That's a promise.

That's, that's, that's good. That's worth the whole trip coming today, folks, and I'll keep you in tune on that. But there's. There's so many things, John, that I don't understand now. I don't need to understand them all, but I like to. But I just know that we have to constantly be throwing diversity and crop rotation. We have to. And once we steer away from that. We're setting ourselves up.